Humans thrive best in almost every way when they are able to band
together in large numbers and live peaceably together.

Any community helps improve the odds of survival and reproduction of
the individuals within it, but the larger and more stable the society, the more
those odds improve.

A larger community will be better able to promote safety from outside
invasion.

The larger the community, the larger the pool of potential mates for each
new generation, so that the genetic mixture is more likely to stay robust and
varied.

The larger and more prosperous the community, the more its members
can specialize to the benefit of all.

And the larger and more specialized the community, the more good ideas
are likely to be thought of, taught, learned, and passed on to the next
generation.

Civilization occurs when the community becomes so large and stable that
it can be called a city -- that is, when it is self-sustaining without having to
rove, and able to protect itself from outside domination for an extended period
of time.

The more effective a civilization is, the more it will attract the allegiance
of people who did not grow up within its boundaries. They will migrate to it,
either for trade or, if they are allowed, citizenship.

Some civilizations become so convinced of their superiority to all others
that they deliberately reach out to include other cities or nations within their
sphere of influence. Sometimes this is by conquest, sometimes by alliance and
trade.

But what we can never forget is that civilizations all die.

Some of them can last for centuries; some flourish and disappear in a
few generations. Some leave behind great monuments and influence other
civilizations far in their future; others are completely swallowed up and
forgotten except, perhaps, by archaeologists.

And some just ... fade away.

Every civilization seems to itself to be indestructible -- even in the midst
of self-destruction. And those who call attention to this fact, and point out the
great danger the civilization is in, are generally resented, hated, despised, or
ridiculed.

When the civilization doesn't collapse, the doomsayer is discredited; and
then is cited as a precedent for all future doomsayers. "Oh, yes, Jeremiah used
to say that sort of thing, and yet we weren't destroyed. So your warnings are
just another jeremiad!"

That's what happened to Winston Churchill, when he saw Hitler's
civilization-wrecking potential. Not until Hitler proved his bad intentions did
anyone believe Churchill -- and even then, even after the invasion of Poland, it
took months for public opinion to embrace the obvious. It was almost, but not
quite, too late.

But the story of Cassandra is the more usual one. The person giving
warning is simply not believed until the Trojan horse has been dragged into the
city and the enemy has snuck out, opened the gates, and brought down
destruction on all.

Then everybody wishes they'd taken the warnings more seriously.

The trouble is, the people giving warning never know themselves whether
they're going to be proven right in the short run. Civilizations are often
resilient and self-healing -- because the survival of the civilization is viewed as
being desirable, even crucial, for many of the subcommunities within it, they
find ways to prop it up and keep it going for another year or decade or
generation or century.

And when they do, the person who gave warning is treated as just
another "boy who cried wolf" -- even though the dangers were real and the
damage was severe and the civilization that survived was not really the one
that originally achieved greatness.

The Byzantine Empire limped along, ever more feebly, long past the time
when it represented anything productive or vigorous or fine. It was coasting on
the achievements of its founders, but it wasn't Roman anymore, it was just
another Middle Eastern empire, corrupt, destructive, and failed. As long as it
could maintain the illusion that it was the same empire, though, it retained
legitimacy in the eyes of enough people that it could endure.

Think of the warning we've been given, over and over, about depletion of
oil. The original doomsayers made the gross mistake of naming a year when
we would run out of easily extracted oil. When that year came and went and
there was still plenty of gasoline at the pumps, a surprising number of highly
educated fools talked as if this proved that free market forces could deal with
the oil problem.

But the doomsayers were absolutely right: We did run out of oil that was
cheaply extractable by then-known methods, from known reserves. What the
doomsayer could not predict was (1) improvements in extraction technology
and (2) discovery of new reserves that could now be extracted.

So I read statements that are put forward in all seriousness that "free
markets will solve the oil problem" simply because free market forces served to
make new extraction technologies cheap enough to stave off the oil collapse for
another generation.

But the jeremiahs were right: There is a finite amount of oil in the world
and the free market (which, by the way, creates nothing -- people do that)
cannot create any more oil. Yes, other energy sources will certainly be invented
to make up for the missing oil -- but there will be a horrible dislocation
beforehand with an almost certain collapse of the global economy and the
resulting deaths and misery. All of which could be avoided by energy-replacement efforts as intense as, say, the space program of the 1960s.

Hitler was eventually stopped -- but only after millions of people had
died. Wouldn't it have been better, though, if Britain and France had heeded
that annoying (and sometimes wrong) jeremiah, Churchill and nipped the
Hitler problem in the bud?

And didn't the people who once cheered Chamberlain curse his name as
they sent their sons off to war and as bombs fell in their neighborhoods?

I have a book you need to read: Dark Age Ahead.

Jane Jacobs is the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
She is accustomed to looking at life cycles and patterns of the precise unit of
community that brings civilizations into existence: the city.

And those who have the ludicrous idea that I am a conservative and
therefore not to be listened to can take comfort from the fact that Jacobs is
most definitely a card-carrying member of the right-wing-hating Left. Her book
is laced with snide remarks blaming Thatcher and Reagan for anything bad
that happened when they were in power, while she treats the equally idiotic
mistakes of Leftist leaders as if they were unavoidable forces of nature, not to
be blamed on anyone. Biased? Yes, she is.

But bias or not, she's smart, and when she is following data where it
leads, wise people must listen.

Jacobs sees us as being well down the road to a self-inflicted Dark Age,
in which we will have thrown away many of the very things that made our
civilization so dominant, so prosperous, so successful. We are not immune to
the natural laws that govern the formation and dissolution of human
communities: When the civilization no longer provides the benefits that lead to
success, then, unsurprisingly, the civilization is likely to fail.

As she says in her introduction, "People living in vigorous cultures
typically treasure those cultures and resist any threat to them. How and why
can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes literally
lost?"

Dark Age Ahead gives us a series of concrete examples of exactly that
process.

"Every culture," she says, "takes pains to educate its yong so that they,
in their turn, can practice and transmit it completely." Our civilization,
however, is failing to do that. On the contrary, we are systematically training
our young not to embrace the culture that brought us greatness.

A civilization is truly dead, she says, when "even the memory of what has
been lost is lost."

I would apply this principle in areas where, as a true Leftist, she would
not dream of applying it: For instance, we have now raised a generation that
does not even expect that marriage will precede sexual union and cohabitation
because they have never seen it work that way. We have spent a generation
trivializing the family, debasing it and undermining it until it doesn't have as
much practical value as a stock certificate.

"A culture is unsalvageable if stabilizing forces themselves become ruined
and irrelevant," she says, and she is absolutely right: And the single most
important stabilizing force in any civilization is and always has been the family.

She looks at the evidence of family destruction (and, as a Canadian,
she relies quite heavily on Canadian evidence, but the problems all show up
throughout western civilization) with her skeptical eye. Statistics have a way of
disguising, not revealing, the truth.

As, for instance, the statistic that almost half of all marriages end in
divorce. As she says in a footnote, this is "a poorly conceived statistic.
Common knowledge tells us that it must be compounded from a large number
of very short marriages (two to five years long) and a smaller number of lasting
marriages (upwards of twenty years long).

Much of her argument is economic, but the crucial points are social.
Most of us don't live in neighborhoods (the modern village) any more; we live
among strangers. We just don't meet each other in person in any meaningful
way, so the sense of community and belonging is eroding. To what, then, are
we expected to feel the kind of loyalty that leads people to sacrifice in order to
maintain the civilization for the good of all? Who are these "all" whose good we
will be sustaining? If we feel ourselves not to belong to that group, then we are
no longer part of the civilization; and when most members of a civilization feel
no stake in its preservation, it will not survive.

Another way we are destroying ourselves is by "credentialing" our
students instead of educating them. Everyone these days blames our bad
educational system on something or someone, but few people bother to point
out precisely how it is bad and why it hurts our civilization as a whole.

Jacobs says, "Students who are passionate about learning, or could
become so, do exist. Faculty members who love their subjects passionately
and are eager to teach what they know and to plumb its depths further also
exist. But institutions devoted to respecting and fulfilling these needs as their
first purposes have become rare."

A topic on which she is a genuine, experienced expert is the
abandonment of science. She provides concrete examples -- literally
concrete! -- of people who take irreversible actions citing as their authority
"science" that simply doesn't exist.

Her science is city life, its ebb and flow, including traffic, commerce,
architecture. And she has seen traffic designers, for instance, make decisions
that were obviously horrible, all the while reciting as mantras of justification
"scientific finding" that can't be found. Like the mythical spouse abuse on
Super Bowl Sunday, the farther you track the evidence back toward its source,
the less it seems to exist.

She does not extrapolate this to where it obviously leads -- to the vast
social experiments that are being performed on our civilization without a shred
of scientific evidence to support the idea that they are necessary, desirable, or
harmless. But her examples are chilling enough. Scientists do exist -- but, as
she points out, the ones who know what they're doing don't spend enough time
denouncing those who are making stuff up and calling it science in order to
compel other people to let them do harm.

She also goes after dumbed-down taxes. This one will chill the hearts of
free-market, low-tax libertarian fiscal conservatives, and they will be full of rant
about how wrong she is. But she isn't wrong. Her view is not complete -- this
chapter is the one most victimized by her allegiance to the Left and her need to
find flaws only with the decisions of conservative politicians -- but the
problems she points out are real and the solution is not "more of the same."

Her chapter on the failure of the various professions to police
themselves is utterly damning, and we are all paying the cost of those failures.
From doctors to lawyers to engineers to the police themselves, when members
of a profession resist outside regulation, but then fail to eliminate malpractice
within their own ranks, they become a conspiracy against the public and a
force for the breakdown of trust.

And it is upon a foundation of trust that civilization is constructed.

Just as Neville Chamberlain trusted Hitler to behave like a rational head
of state, trust only works when it is placed in trustworthy people and
institutions. Jacobs's message, while it is by no means exhaustive, is both
clear and true: We have destroyed or allowed the weakening of core institutions
and processes to the point where we can no longer trust them; and unless they
can be made to deserve trust again, and then receive that trust, we are truly
headed for a dark age in which we can't even remember what civilization looked
like.

Whenever I hear somebody answer one of my jeremiads with the deeply
stupid question, "Well, do you want to go back to the fifties with segregation
and McCarthyism and 'Father Knows Best'?" I feel the chill of despair. We
seem to have fallen in love with the idea of hating our own past.

But for those who are ignorant of history -- i.e., anyone whose education
was acquired in an ordinary American high school or university -- let me
remind you:

It was in the 1950s that the Marshall Plan set a new standard for
treatment of defeated enemies.

It was in the 1950s that the armed forces were integrated and the first
court decisions struck down segregation in the schools and began the road
toward the integration of all races into the fabric of American society.

It was in the 1950s when television programs actually tried to show
inexperienced families how kind and loving parents responded to problems and
solved them peacefully.

It was in the 1950s when actively subversive Communists extended their
rule over nearly half the population of the world, and America led the way in
standing against the further extension of this evil, oppressive, cruelly
anticivilized ideology.

It was in the 1950s that the GI Bill opened the doors of the American
university to people who a generation before could barely afford to stay out of
the workforce long enough to get a high school diploma.

The 1950s were the last decade in which marriage was still believed to be
permanent, illegitimate births and abortions were rare, and adults chaperoned
children to keep them from having sex before they were ready to deal with the
consequences.

No civilization has ever been as successful at bringing freedom, self-government, relative safety, and a chance for happiness to such a large
proportion of the human race as the civilization of western democracies under
the leadership of the United States of America. And a rational claim can be
made for the idea that the 1950s represent the peak from which we have
deliberately and unnecessarily fled, heading irrationally downward into
darkness.

Jane Jacobs offers possibilities for solving the problems she lists, and
her ideas must be taken into account. Unfortunately, she only sees some of
the problems; we are farther gone, and on more fronts, than she realizes.

As with our vanishing, squandered resource of oil, we continue to live
under the illusion that there's plenty of civilization left. We continue to think it
will go on forever, without our needing to make any sacrifices or take any
collective action to preserve it.

And by the time we realize that Jane Jacobs's jeremiad, far from being
radical, was barely scratching the surface of the danger we face, I fear it will be
too late to reverse course.

Maybe it already is.

But then, maybe it isn't. And if enough people take the time to read, to
think, to set aside their fanaticisms and actually open their minds to the
possibility that their dogmas -- of the Left and Right -- might be incomplete or
wrong, then maybe we can turn back the clock to a time when our civilization
was worth emulating, worth joining, worth fighting for, and worth spreading
through the world.

 Many people have asked OSC where they can get the facts behind the rhetoric about the war. A good starting place is: "Who Is Lying About Iraq?" by Norman Podhoretz, who takes on the "Bush Lied, People Died" slogan.